Not necessarily. While sgmlspl is fully functional, it is not always particularly intuitive or pleasant to use. There is a new proposed standard, Document Style Semantics and Specification Language (DSSSL), based on the Scheme programming language, and implementations should soon be available. To read more about the DSSSL standard, see http://www.jclark.com/dsssl/ on the Internet.
That said, DSSSL is a declarative, side-effect-free programming language, while sgmlspl allows you to use any programming constructions available in perl5, including those with side-effects. This means that if you want to do more than simply format the document or convert it from one Document Type Definition (DTD) to another, sgmlspl might be a good choice.
David Megginson <dmeggins@aix1.uottawa.ca>